We felt the good vibes

We went through a very dark stretch but finally have some good news to report. Two nights ago had Louise waking up in the middle of the night in excruciating pain. More pain than what was to be expected for that stage of her recovery. We had to give her pain medicine about six hours early just to get her through the night.

As you can imagine, we were not about to go through that again last night. We brought her back in for an emergency visit to our vet. He removed the bandage to examine the paw and concluded that the toe was actually healing as expected - however it now appeared that the toe next to it was swollen and inflamed, or at least seriously irritated.

We still had not heard from the lab and started to fear for the worst. Dr. Sandhu gave Louise a special dose of pain medicine to help her through the night and rebandaged her paw, but we still left concerned over the unknowns.

Last night went by without incident. Louise seemed to be in a lot less pain, but I could not help but wonder about the irritation in her paw. Why wasn't it healing like we hoped?

I heard from Dr. Sandhu this afternoon, after he was in contact with the lab. The results were favorable: there was a cyst that was removed, it was not malignant (meaning it was not cancer) and even better, the lab was able to conclude that the doctor got it all so we would not have to go back in to get the rest. Apparently it was some type of under-the-skin wart.

The doctor then went on to say that he suspected the irritation we saw in the other digit might have been caused by the tightness of the bandage (which was done to prevent it from slipping off, a frequent occurrence with this dog) and also the fact that her paw would not have been able to bend naturally when bandaged, forcing her to walk on her toes. Indeed, the bandage he put on last night was much looser and Louise does seem to be a lot more comfortable. It could be argued that she was comfortable last night because of the stronger pain medicine. But that has worn off by now and she is still doing fine.

How fine you ask? I'll let this last photo speak to that. Note our creative handiwork with the emergency bandage. Yes, the looser one fell off this evening, but luckily it was indoors so we were able to keep her paw clean. Dr. Sandhu if you are reading this, you can expect to hear from me in the morning about getting someone's paw redressed.